Microsoft's document gambit moves ahead

A battle is being fought in the arcane world of international standards, with piles of money and long-term access to digital documents at stake.

Years of work to bring XML-based documents to Microsoft Office will culminate on Thursday, when Ecma International is expected to certify Microsoft Office formats as international standards.

While the anticipated approval is significant, notably to government customers in Europe, Microsoft's foray into documents standards in many ways has just begun.

The company has dominated the desktop productivity market for well over a decade. But another document standard, called OpenDocument Format, or ODF, has emerged as a viable alternative and has garnered interest from a growing number of governments and technology vendors .

These document format standards matter a great deal financially, because they can influence which software products companies choose to buy. Microsoft Office Open XML is the default document format for its Office 2007 suite, which was recently released to businesses and is set for consumer availability on January 30. Alternative OpenDocument is the default for the open-source suite OpenOffice.org and the preference of Microsoft rivals IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems.

The emergence of dueling standards has ratcheted up the competition in Microsoft's home turf--a situation that should benefit end users who care about accessing documents in the future, said Andrew Updegrove, an attorney at Gesmer Updegrove and author of a blog that follows international standards.

"This is important. What's at stake is that a technology-based society is coming to grips with aspects of technology that they have foolishly ignored to date," said Updegrove, who is also the attorney for OASIS, the standards body behind OpenDocument.

Andrew Updegrove

The emergence of parallel document standards--with another being formed for China--casts light on the intertwined nature of technology standards and politics. Much like parties taking sides on a hot-button political issue, factions with aligning interests have emerged.

"ODF and Linux represent the first chinks in Microsoft's armor in a long time. And just like the way Microsoft is going to do everything it can to protect (its desktop software business), others are going to do all they can to exploit that weakness," Updegrove said.

High emotions and back-room politics
While discussions of international standards typically appeal to a small number of technocrats, the ongoing debate over document standards can be a highly emotional issue.

That decision prompted Groklaw blog author Pamela Jones, who tracks legal news in the technology industry, to accuse Novell of "forking" OpenOffice. ("Forks" come when groups have different ideas about how code should progress and take it from a single point along divergent paths.) Novell's open-source vice president, Miguel de Icaza, defended the company in a spirited response posted to his blog.

"The reality is that people react emotionally--it's Microsoft," said Justin Steinman, Novell's director of marketing for Linux and open-platform solutions. "If people can step away from the emotion and look at this objectively, they can see this (document interoperability) as goodness for the end customer."

State of play
The State of Massachusetts drew international attention last year when it decided to mandate the use in its agencies of software that worked with standard "open formats." At the time, that technology did not include Microsoft Office.

That Massachusetts initiative is still in effect, despite being challenged by state politicians and despite the resignation of two chief information officers from the state post. In addition, Microsoft and its supporters have criticized the policy as "exclusionary" and as unfairly favoring non-Microsoft products.

The high-profile case has involved intense behind-the-scenes lobbying. A Microsoft employee pushed for a bill amendment that would have taken technology decision-making power away from the state's chief information officer, according to an account published in Computerworld this week.

Similarly, rival IBM has been endorsing OpenDocument around the world with government customers.

IBM has been distinctly cool to Microsoft's Open XML standard effort. It decided not to participate in the Ecma technical committee around Open XML, calling it a "rubber stamp" process. It also said the specification is redundant, given the existence of OpenDocument.

To further its goal of spreading OpenDocument to national governments, IBM is using its representatives in other international standards groups, said Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft's information worker business.

Big Blue has influenced the governments of Brazil, India and Italy, which this week recognized OpenDocument as standard, through the company's participation in the International Organization for Standards (ISO), he said.

"Those are instances where the ISO process, and IBM's influence on the ISO process, put (ODF) on national standards lists," Yates said.

In response to Yates' comments, an IBM representative said that the company is "proud of its long-standing reputation within standards communities around the world as a respected and open consensus builder, innovation partner, leader, contributor and facilitator."

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